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Bottled Blondes, You Too Can Break Free

IN an image-obsessed culture predominated by bottled blondes and man-made brunettes, a naturally gray-haired woman can be made to feel that she stands out like dandruff on a dark sweater.

So it took some courage for Anne Kreamer, a contributor to More magazine and yahoo.com, to stop coloring her hair three years ago.

“Gray hair has been stigmatized to mean sexually old or over, and we all want to maintain attractiveness,” said Ms. Kreamer, 51, now the proud owner of a lustrous silver mane. “But if we had more role models like Helen Mirren and Emmylou Harris out there, more women would want gray hair.”

Ms. Kreamer offers herself up as such a role model in her new book, “Going Gray” (Little, Brown), in which she chronicles her dramatic change of hair color from dyed mahogany to the mix of natural shades she describes as “salt and pebble.” It is partly a memoir of her addiction to and withdrawal from hair dye. An epiphany inspires detoxification. The struggle to get clean results in self-clarity.

“It feels deeply liberating to be off the treadmill of ‘Oh God, I have to get my roots done again,’ ” said Ms. Kreamer, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Kurt Andersen, and their daughters.

At a time when more than half of American women ages 13 to 69 color their hair, Ms. Kreamer argues that hair dye is the great divide that separates those who are in denial about aging from those who embrace it. Dyed hair looks as artificial as a toupee, she concludes, whereas gray suggests candor.

“We have been brainwashed to think hair dye looks good,” Ms. Kreamer said last Saturday, sitting on a chaise longue in her living room. “I wanted to open up the conversation and get people to ask themselves why they are doing it.”

In interviews last week at beauty salons in Manhattan, clients said they viewed coloring their grays as a means to maintain professional currency, attract romantic partners, mask their age, and, of course, express their inner blondes.

At the John Barrett Salon at Bergdorf Goodman, Marilyn Bevington, an investment adviser, had her gray roots touched up with light gold, a shade that recalled the natural blond of her youth.

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NATURAL WOMAN In Going Gray, Anne Kreamer writes of being deeply liberated from hair coloring.Credit
Robert Wright for The New York Times

“In New York, there is tremendous emphasis on being young and fresh, on keeping current and having your hands on the pulse of the market,” said Ms. Bevington, who declined to disclose her age. “Speaking of gray hair, a lot of young entrepreneurs would be much less apt to take advice from someone who looked like their mother or their grandmother.”

At the Warren-Tricomi Salon on West 57th Street, Jonelle Caro, a singing teacher from Fort Lee, N.J., also had her roots touched up with a bright blond.

“Gray hair? I hate it! I don’t think it does a thing for me,” said Ms. Caro, who is in her 50s. She recounted how some of her elementary school students recently complained to her that a gray-haired substitute teacher looked old. “The better you look, the better people relate to you, even children,” she said.

Rose Weitz, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, said that, some cultures view white hair as a symbol of wisdom and maturity while others interpret it as obsolescence and reproductive decline.

“For women who see themselves as young, vibrant members of society, the fear is that you become invisible to others when you start to get gray hair,” said Dr. Weitz, the author of “Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About Women’s Lives.” “The only people you see with gray hair on T.V. are the crotchety old mothers-in-law.”

If gray-haired leading roles are few, gray-haired celebrities seem even fewer. Those public figures with salt or peppered heads — George Clooney, Toni Morrison, Ms. Mirren, Anderson Cooper — tend to be preternaturally handsome people who play up their hair as a trademark feature.

“We like to think of ourselves as being original in some way and to color my hair would have been to do what everyone else is doing,” said Emmylou Harris, 60, of Nashville, whose white blond hair has become a powerful signature. “I look different and I think I look good that way, so that is my vanity.”

In her book, Ms. Kreamer sets out to prove that an attractive noncelebrity can also remain alluring as she lets her ersatz brunette fade to gray.

The epiphany came when Ms. Kreamer, then 49, saw a photo of herself beside her teenage daughter and a gray-haired friend. She decided that they looked “real” while her dyed hair looked fraudulent.

“In one second, all my years of careful artifice, attempting to preserve what I thought of as a youthful look, were ripped away,” she writes. “All I saw was a kind of confused, schlubby middle-aged woman with hair dyed much too harshly.”

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Clockwise, from top left: Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada; Emmylou Harris; Queen Elizabeth II; and Toni Morrison.
Credit
Clockwise, from top left: Barry Wetcher/European Pressphoto Agency; Heidi Schumann for The New York Times; Johnny Green/Pool via Associated Press; Ed Alcock for The New York Times.

Having spent an estimated $65,000 on hair coloring over 24 years, Ms. Kreamer decided to “embrace more authenticity” by going gray. The decision led to experiments — some more rigorous than others — to gauge American attitudes to graying.

First she created a poll in which about 500 respondents were asked the ages of seven people, including Ms. Kreamer, who had been photo-shopped to appear with gray hair or another hue. The results: “A color other than gray or white does make people look younger by about three years on average.”

But when Ms. Kreamer posted fake personal ads on Match.com to learn whether gentlemen preferred her brown, she got counterintuitive results. Her profile with the gray-haired photo received more interest than one showing her with brown hair posted later.

“People reflexively think that gray hair connotes aging and is less attractive, but when faced with the specific reality of it, we find that it just isn’t true,” she writes.

But Ms. Kreamer’s gray-versus-brown contest is not altogether unbiased. Photos on the book jacket show a “before” image of her as a frumpy brunette with an unflattering haircut next to an “after” photo with styled gray hair, flattering lighting and a more tailored outfit. And when she asks a man in a bar how he likes her gray hair, she is likely to elicit as honest an answer as the woman who asks, “Do these pants make me look fat?”

Meanwhile, her insistence that hair color boils down to “truthfulness” seems self-congratulatory and, at times, even lookist.

“I am not fat. I don’t often wear matronly clothes,” she writes. Then later on, “Did I really think that overnight I’d turn into Barbara Bush or Queen Elizabeth?”

The idea that going gray is acceptable as long as one does not look chubby or actually old, makes Ms. Kreamer an unlikely candidate for the Everywoman of authentic aging. Moreover, she has the advantage of being middle-class, in a decades-long marriage and in a career that does not require office upkeep.

Dr. Weitz of Arizona said that the average woman may face more economic, romantic and social pressure to color her hair.

“Dying your hair wouldn’t make you less authentically you,” Dr. Weitz said. “But it could mean that you had fewer life choices.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page G3 of the New York edition with the headline: Bottled Blondes, You Too Can Break Free. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe